Kim,
I read that and found it quite interesting. I think there is an angle that the author leaves out. While we had massive inflation in the price of goods, we didn't have wage inflation. As always, that's probably too complex to explain in a general journalistic article, but a key to avoiding wages being inflated right along with the price of goods was a well run attack on Unions in the country. The standout example being Reagan's attack on the Air Traffic Controllers.
In 1980 when inflation rates were hitting 14% (
SOURCE) the growth in wage rates were almost flat and stayed that way even after inflation dropped back down to ONLY 7-8%. (
SOURCE)

(SOURCE: ibid)
I completely agree with the author's general conclusion that we are seeing the damage caused by inflation and the demented response to it, which is trickle-down economic policy.
Keith,
I agree that the Government needs to be efficient, and that they appear to be inefficient at a lot of things. What I have discovered as I've grown older is to be more careful in my critique of folks trying to do things that I've never done. Let's take Medicare for example, I really have no idea how I'd run a national health insurance org with hundreds of thousands of clients and what levels of efficiency I'd actually have. I believe I might be able to do better than the folks currently doing it, but I have absolutely zero evidence of that being true. Talking to my son the Marine, I ran right into how little I actually know about running a military organization; and I'm someone who spent many years with over 18,000 people reporting to me.
At the root of this is a universal American trait of playing Monday morning quarterback. I've had folks who couldn't manage a gas station tell me exactly what they think is wrong with the way the US Gov. runs the IRS, FBI, etc...etc..... etc.... I'm not accusing you of that, but I'm certainly accusing a large parentage of the US population that loves to berate everything from their state's DMV to the US Congress as being populated with idiots and neer-do-wells.
Personally, I was surprised at how well the Code For American folks and the US Digital Service did at fixing the web stuff that was broken in Obamacare. But there the failure wasn't with the Government, it was with the Government contractors who were the only ones bidding on the original work. Of Course this administration has pretty well shut down the USDS because it had Obama's finger prints on it and anything Obama did must, by definition, be wrong.
Ah me.....
There is one last observation I'd like folks to consider. Worker's compensation has been getting competition from overseas labor but also from automation. As we look at the productivity curve above, I can't help but think that much of that is from various forms of automation. Robots are the physical manifestation, email is better hidden. Consider the number of letter carriers etc... that were put out of work by email. Thus, as various forms of automation really took off, they competed with a number of sectors of the labor market.
Finally, sorry this post is so long, we have provided free capital to those who could put it to work since the crash of 2008. (Free meaning the true cost of capital is lower than the inflation rate.) When this happened, we saw a massive increase in management's willingness to automate by buying machines which replaced labor. After all, the capital was free. A side effect of our "stimulus" was to provide a tremendous boost to those who have an ability to replace labor with machines. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have stimulated the economy in 2008, only that there are unintended and often unpredicted side effects of what we do with policy.